Check out this video featuring Ancient Language Institute Professor Luke Ranieri, as he and other Latin speakers converse with a native Romanian speaker. Why do people often find the Romance languages to be especially melodic and sweet? There are at least two features that might contribute to this perception. First, compared to the Germanic languages—English, German, and Dutch being the main ones—the Romance languages tend to use vowels more frequently relative to consonants.
Second, patterns of stress and intonation probably make the Romance languages more attractive to our ears. Whereas English prefers to place the accent on the first or middle syllable of a word e.
To see how this works in action, compare Latin-derived English words with their Romance cognates and notice how the stress shifts. This gives Romance languages a smooth and rolling, even musical, effect.
Still, there is great variation from language to language. While Spanish is spoken with a comparatively narrow pitch range, Italian rises and falls over a wide scale, lending it the singsong quality that nonnative speakers often find so enchanting.
Diversity within languages also makes it hard to generalize. Argentine Spanish sounds markedly different from the Spanish in Spain, and both sound different from Mexican Spanish. Furthermore, not everyone finds Romance languages irresistibly charming. Although French is popularly known as the language of love, its nasal vowel vocalization and guttural r come across as grating to some hearers.
Conversely, German, which is sometimes stereotyped as a harsh language, often surprises foreigners by sounding pleasantly mild and controlled. In fact, the great bard of Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges, preferred English to his native Spanish , in part because of where the stress usually falls in the two languages.
In other words, whether or not a language is beautiful is a subjective determination—and in the case of the Romance languages, it may have more to do with the way they evoke the elegance of Old Europe. But today, the Romance languages are at home far beyond Europe. The vast majority of Spanish speakers live in Latin America, not Spain. And Brazil boasts about 20 times as many Portuguese speakers as Portugal! While Europe is facing population decline, Francophone Africa and Latin America are set to keep growing rapidly for the next few decades.
Add to this the fact that Spanish and French are two of the three official United Nations languages, and you can see why the Romance languages will be globally relevant for a long time to come. One writer albeit a proud Frenchman even argued in Forbes that the language of the future will not be English, Spanish, Arabic or even Chinese—but French! How did Latin birth so many distinct yet closely related tongues? The story of the Romance languages is full of twists and turns, and a bit of conjecture due to blanks in the linguistic record.
We know scarcely anything about pre-Latin tongues in the areas where the Romance languages are now spoken. However, we do know a central piece of the plot: the history of the Roman Empire. Rome reached the height of its territorial expansion in AD From its seat of power in modern-day Italy, the Empire stretched all the way to Britain in the far north, covered modern-day Spain in the west, claimed a long strip of North Africa from Morocco to Egypt to the south, and extended as far as Turkey and the Levant to the east.
The Roman navy dominated the Mediterranean. Despite periodic revolts in the provinces and crises of succession in the capital, Roman rule brought unprecedented stability to the region, enabling swift travel and flourishing trade.
It also brought Latin. The Empire itself was less fortunate, gradually breaking apart under the strain of high administrative costs, infighting, and overexpansion. Germanic invaders steadily conquered the western provinces, removing the last Roman emperor in Fortunately for the development of the Romance languages, however, the new rulers adopted Latin and Christianity.
Latin remained in use despite the collapse of the Empire and the fragmentation of Europe. Three hundred years later, a Germanic tribe called the Franks became a major political force on the continent.
They were also allied to the Pope in Rome. Under Charlemagne and his successors, the Carolingians, Europe experienced sweeping Church reforms and a linguistic revival.
By this period, the inhabitants of the former Roman provinces were speaking a variety of quasi-Latin dialects. Over the years, and after the fall of the Roman Empire, the language slowly evolved: from Old French into Middle French and finally into the French language we know today. It is spoken, after all, in a total of 84 countries around the globe, including France, Canada, Belgium, western Switzerland, Monaco, and a host of others. It is also the official language of 29 countries.
Thanks to the conquering Romans, Latin was spoken widely throughout a vast region for hundreds of years. But after the fall of the Roman Empire, and during the same time that other Romance languages began to form all over Europe, the Italian language also began to take shape — initially as different regional dialects. These distinct dialects continued to be spoken up and down the Italian peninsula until the unification of Italy in Finally, in the 20th century, with the onset of radio, mass media and World War II, not only was Italy unified but their language was as well.
Today, although some regional dialects still exist, Italians by in large speak standard Italian. Along with the myriad of other regions invaded and conquered by the Roman Empire, so was the area that we now know as Romania.
This group of languages split from the Western Romance category between the 5th and 8th centuries AD. Today, roughly 26 million people speak Romanian, most of whom live in Romania and Moldova.
As a result, we have a variety of forms. For example, Latin had herba , which began with an h —but in all five of these languages the h is gone. Spanish has the word hierba ; the h sound is long gone.
H is fragile and has a way of disappearing in languages. The same thing happened to our word. Italian, of the five Romance languages, is closest to Latin. Learn more about how sounds evolve. Other languages, though, have gone a little further. Not only is the h dropped in pronunciation, but the letter a is dropped at the end. Then, you have in Portuguese erva. The b changed to a v. In Portuguese you have erva. The b transformed to a v. In the Latin alphabet, b is near the beginning, and v is down at the end.
If you think about it, b and v are related in terms of how they are pronounced in the mouth. Just as a t will often become a d , you can feel a d as a version of t in pronunciation, just with a little bit more belly in it. For those who know Spanish, think about the pronunciation of b as v in many Spanish dialects. The Spanish hierba in Portuguese is erva. Spanish and Romanian use unusual manipulations with the vowels. What is that? All of this goes back to herba.
This type of lingual shift happens to every word in the language.
0コメント